1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates generally to distributed computer networks, and to the automation of membership discovery in a distributed computer network.
2. Description of the Related Art
A virtual provider local area network (LAN) service, also known as a VPLS, is a class of virtual provider networks (VPNs) that allow multiple customer sites to be connected where the sites appear to be on the same LAN (distributed network). VPLS service is typically offered over a provider managed Internet protocol/multi label switching (IP/MPLS) infrastructure. A VPLS could have up to a few hundred, or even thousands of sites across the entire distributed network.
Based upon the VPLS architecture model described in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) documents, the following manual provisioning steps may need to be repeated when adding, deleting, or modifying a customer site: 1) Add, delete, or modify a customer site to an attached multi tenant unit (MTU); 2) Add, delete, or modify a MPLS VC (multi-protocol switch path virtual circuit) between the MTU and its attached physical edge (PE) device; and, 3) Add, delete or modify a MPLS VC between a pair of PEs that are associated with the VPLS.
Manually configuring a large quantity of VPLS service sites requires significant coordination efforts for site-to-site connectivity provisioning. Due to the nature of the provisioning complexity, manual steps often cause mistakes and troubleshooting difficulties, and slow down the overall service provisioning process.
Accordingly, a need exists for an improved method and system for provisioning of distributed computer networks.